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FACELESS: HIGH PROFILE MURDERS AND PUBLIC RECOGNITION Abstract This paper reports on the outcome of an investigation into whether or not members of the public would recognise high profile victims and perpetrators and, if so, whom. The study was based on the premise that prominent media coverage would cause a greater number of perpetrators to be recognised than victims and that those victims who were recognised would be white children. Field research was conducted in a University and in non-University settings, such as fast food outlets, bus stops and shopping centres. All twenty images used were black and white headshots. Most photographs showed one person, but two photographs had two images. 103 people were surveyed. The majority of our sample (78%) were unable to name any victims or perpetrators. These results provide strong evidence to suggest that despite twenty- four hour rolling news and the prominence of high profile victims and perpetrators on the front pages of national newspapers, the public fails to remember who these victims and perpetrators are. We discuss why this may be so. Key Words: High Profile, Murders, Public Recognition, and Media Coverage Introduction Robert Reiner questioned whether crime, as represented in the mass media, was concerned with “subversion, social control or mental chewing gum,” (Reiner, 2007: 302). In other words, reflecting a generation of intense academic debate, does the media’s representations of crime and criminals – both in fact and in fiction – have some effect on the audiences who consume these representations? Or, alternatively, do they have very little, or indeed no impact whatsoever? This is a good question to ask, especially in relation to violent crimes such as serial and spree killings, as well as about certain individual, high profile murders. These have become significant events which attract enormous media coverage and public interest (see Wilson, 2009, for a general introduction about serial murder and for the media interest in serial and spree murder Haggerty, 2009; Macdonald (ed), 2013). Images of the victims of these crimes 1 and the perpetrators when caught, arrested and charged and certainly during trials, feature on TV news bulletins, initially often as “breaking news”. They also appear on the front pages of all national newspapers; broadsheets as well as tabloids. Indeed, Greer and Reiner have further argued that a key feature of contemporary society “is the omnipresence of mass media communication, in rapidly proliferating new forums to the extent that a significant part of each day is devoted by most people to media consumption of various kinds” (Greer and Reiner, 2012: 245). It has long been established that crime is one of the major components of this omnipresence of mass media communication (Williams and Dickinson, 1993; Ericson et al., 1991; Ericson, 1995; Pearson, 2002). The contemporary mass media, news agenda is also now increasingly accessed via online platforms, with rising numbers of younger people receiving news on the internet (Ofcom, 2014). This can be saturated with images of violent crimes and criminals. Here too we should note that crime news is not only consumed online but is reproduced, recycled and discussed in this digital environment, most notably through social media sites. One key example is Twitter, where the type of crime and the gender of the victim can have a significant impact upon how it is processed by users. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that “news about violent crimes with males as victims are being discussed more intensively than those with female victims” (Lampoltshammer et al., 2014: 65). However, we should also remember that even before the advent of the mass media and the development of online platforms and social media outlets, crime and the punishment of offenders has long been of interest to the general public. Crowds, for example, often gathered to witness executions or humiliate those placed in stocks or in a pillory. Additionally, 2 when stocks and pillories were in use, the public had an opportunity to inflict further punishment on the offender by taunting, teasing, laughing or throwing objects at them. This could include rotten food, mud, offal and occasionally stones or bricks potentially leading to disfigurement, serious injury and, in exceptional instances, death. There are of course too many criminal acts – even violent criminal acts - committed for them all to generate significant media attention. Williams and Dickinson (1993) found that while routine court coverage can be restricted to a column or two in local or regional newspapers, nationally, an average of 13% of event orientated news reports concerned crime. This ranged from 5% in the Guardian to 30% in the Sun. Reiner (2003) noted that reporting of crime stories has increased in recent years from under 10% in the Times and the Daily Mirror in the 1940’s, to over 20% in the 1990’s. Homicide was the most common type of crime reported and a third of all crime news stories. How, though, are these crime stories actually chosen? As newspaper proprietors are predominantly focused on selling newspapers to increase their profit (Beckett and Sasson, 2000), a process McManus (1994) refers to as “market-driven journalism”, the “reporting of crime is, of necessity, selective” (Peelo, 2005: 26). From this perspective, therefore, “news organization decisions are based on journalist and news editor perceptions of what type of stories resonate with the general public. Accordingly, the news production process becomes characterized as an exercise in market strategy rather than a presentation of an accurate summary of local, national, and world events” (Buckler and Travis, 2005: 1). As such it is clear 3 that the media do not publish or broadcast every criminal act that is within the public domain, but are selective of the kinds of crimes, criminals and circumstances upon which they report. Some criminal acts are chosen over others because of their ‘newsworthiness’ – in other words, those aspects of a crime that journalists argue make for a good news story. This judgment is, in turn, a product of their ‘newsroom culture’ (Scraton, et al., 1991: 111; see also Wilson et al., 2010: 154). It can mean that the “pursuit of market and organizational imperatives often results in crime coverage that is disproportionate to the reality of the crime problem” (Buckler and Salanas, 2009: 719). In seeking to determine what constitutes a human interest story, Johnstone et al. (1994) set out what they referred to as the ‘Doyle criteria’. This arose from Doyle’s analysis that a human interest story is one that either a) involves a socially “prominent” or “respectable” citizen who is involved as either an offender or as a victim; b) the victim is an innocent or an overmatched target; c) the murder was either shocking or brutal, involved multiple victims and/or offenders, or in which a particularly brutal method of killing was employed; or d) the narrative generates mystery suspense, or drama. Chermak (1995) considered that news organisations assessed newsworthiness of a crime based on (i) the violent or heinous nature of the offence, (ii) demographic factors of the victim and offender (age, race, gender, income, and socioeconomic status), (iii) characteristics of the incident producers (the news agency), (iv) the uniqueness of the event, and (v) event salience (for example, is the offence a local 4 event). Prichard and Hughes (1997) similarly thought that the unusualness of the event, the parties involved and the extent to which formally and informally established cultural norms and expectations were violated influenced newsworthiness of that crime for news organisations. For Buckler and Travis (2005), news organisations tended to focus their attention on homicides that are statistically deviant (e.g., involved female victims, multiple victims, unusual weapons, and were committed by strangers), involved a violation of strong cultural norms of behaviour (e.g., robbery-related and stranger-related homicides), and which commanded strong emotional reactions from the general public (e.g., those that involved multiple victims, minority offenders, strangers, and involve minority offenders who murdered non- minority victims). In thinking about news values in the new millennium Jewkes (2004: 40–55) considered that 12 factors influenced judgements that journalists and editors make when assessing the level of public interest that a story will potentially generate. Wilson et al. (2010) summarised these as: 1. Threshold: Asking whether a story is significant enough to be of interest to a national audience; 2. Predictability: Vital resources are often committed to pre-planned events, ensuring their place on the running order; 3. Simplification: A crime story must be ‘reducible to a minimum number of parts or themes’; 4. Individualism: Stories must have a ‘human interest’ appeal and be easy to relate to; 5 5. Risk: We could all be victims with little attention given to crime avoidance; 6. Sex: Sexual violence, ‘stranger-danger’ and female offenders being portrayed as sexual predators; 7. Celebrity or high status persons: The media is attracted to all elements of celebrity and crime is no different; 8. Proximity: Both spatially and culturally; 9. Violence: As with sex, it fulfils the media’s desire for drama; 10. Spectacle and graphic imagery: Particularly for television news; 11. Children: Either as victims or offenders; 12. Conservative ideology and political diversion: Protecting the ‘British way of life’. Peelo et al. (2004) argue in their analysis of how the Times, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror had contributed to the social construction of homicide between 1993 and 1996 that the selection decisions newspapers make in reporting homicides construct a public narrative about killing that is different to reality. Specifically, they noted that of the 2,685 homicide cases that had occurred over their sample period, only 40 per cent were reported in at least one of three newspapers and only 14 per cent had been reported in all three newspapers.

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